Art-Directed World

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Start saving your shekels for the latest book-as-decorating-object, Le Corbusier Le Grand ($200, Phaidon), a 20-pound oversize visual biography of the provincial Swiss lad who became a twentieth-century architectural megaforce. Even those who loathe the be-circular-spectacled modernist for scheming to destroy quaint neighborhoods and replace them with geometric towers will be charmed by his whimsical drawings, his sartorial élan (he maintained a brill lifelong through line of stripes and checks), and his prodigious, disarming letters ("Each time I begin something where I think myself not to be an idiot, it turns out that I am one, to a revolting and unacceptably unjust degree."). The delicious image trove serves as a history of an era and a call to aesthetic arms: Read more, draw more, write more, look more; don't like it? Make it yourself!